Measuring sales to determine ROI has been a challenge for many sales effectiveness solutions over the years. Typically, solutions are great at capturing data for operational use, but very poor at providing insight into the detailed activities of the sales rep. A deep understanding of what sales reps are doing is essential to improve sales performance — and, by extension, grow revenue and profit. If you cannot provide a sales team with value-based solutions, they (and you) will not succeed.

Driving revenue and improving customer engagement are the two most common challenges faced by businesses using Salesforce today. To overcome these challenges, companies must focus first on employee engagement — providing sales teams the solutions they need is the only way they will be as effective as possible.

So why is this still a problem after so much investment in “Sales Effectiveness” solutions, usually as part of a wider Customer Relationship Management solution? We believe strongly that the underlying reason is poor engagement — that the salespeople using the solutions and those creating them are not aligned. Solutions that lack employee engagement impact client engagement, creating a poor experience for clients which impacts revenue.

How do we address this gap between the solutions and Sales? Salespeople need to do their “day job” and sell, therefore they are unlikely to commit significant time to explaining their challenges on an individual basis — “Surely our manager can explain what we do and the challenges we face” and “We have explained this already” are comments we often hear. However, even when sales teams do contribute to organised effectiveness initiatives, they often do not receive viable solutions.  These failings and lack of collaboration create a very clear gap between the desired needs and the solution provided. In turn, this leads to poor user adoption, poor content and data quality, poor sales performance, and a direct negative impact on revenue.

So how do we really help Sales achieve greater success?

We need first and foremost to understand the real needs of the Sales reps without disrupting their day-to-day activities so that management can truly understand the current situation. Engaging and collaborating directly with sales reps is the quickest way to get to the core of their issues. By developing solutions based on sales reps’ reality, not management’s perception of their reality, we can truly develop processes and solutions that provide a significant benefit to reps and align with management’s business outcomes.  

To learn more about Bluewolf’s approach to measuring sales efficiency, connect with us now.